tumid

Every night I was sure her face was as marked and deformed as it was possible for a face to be, but every morning it was somehow darker, more tumid.

TS Eliot wrote of “faces / Distracted from distraction by distraction / Filled with fancies and empty of meaning / Tumid apathy with no concentration”.

As a dedicated “G.o.T.”-er—converted by my nineteen-year-old daughter, who got me hooked last year after she’d endured one too many tumid lectures on the superiority of Tolkien—I have been waiting for the promised teaser, eager for the first hints of what the series’ finale might be.

“I found her unfamiliar, rouged like a corpse, her tumid ankles peeking out, inflated and purple,” Rowbottom writes.

The wife, convinced that Bibi’s presence would infect the unborn child, began to wrap woolen shawls around her tumid belly.