Tubercular

2012, Will Self, “Kafka’s Wound, A digital essay” London Review of Books website, The adult Kafka – the Kafka vermiculated by tubercular bacilli after having been played on for decades, as a demonic organist might press fleshy keys and pull bony stops, by his own relentless neurasthenia – reached a mystical appreciation of his youthful velleity, characterising it as a desire both to expertly hammer together a table and at the same time ‘do nothing’.

As he grew older, his tubercular thinness tended toward emaciation.

He set up business in Sydney, the little capital city of one of the middle Southern states, lived soberly and industriously under the attentive eye of a folk still raw with defeat and hostility, and finally, his good name founded and admission won, he married a gaunt tubercular spinstress, ten years his elder, but with a nest egg and an unshakable will to matrimony.

There had been, too, all the long weeks of Rosie’s tubercular dying to go through.

The engine heaved. […] The thing sounded like a tubercular tugboat engine without a muffler.

Crows on the roof beat their wings and made their low tubercular moan.

His voice? A raspy, nasal and welcoming instrument, with a tubercular kind of charisma.

“ORANGE ORCHID” “SPOTTED ORCHID” […] Dorsal appendage of the hood of column smooth, tubercular and notched at the end.