Krakatit by Karel Čapek

It seemed to him that he was walking about in an enormous kitchen garden. All around was nothing but cabbage heads, not simply heads, but heads which grinned and were slimy from the creatures which had crawled over them; gibbering heads, blear-eyed, monstrous, watery, pimpled and swollen. They were growing on cabbage stumps, and creeping over them were repulsive green caterpillars. And now across the garden there ran towards him the girl with the veil over her face. She raised her skirts a little and jumped over the heads. But under each of them there suddenly sprouted bare, horribly thin and hairy hands, which clutched at her feet and her skirts. The girl screamed in fear, and raised her skirts still higher, above her strong knees, showing her white legs, and tried to spring out of the way of these grasping tentacles. Prokop closed his eyes; he could not bear the sight of her white strong legs and was nearly mad with dread lest those green heads should defile her. He cast himself on the ground and chopped off the first head with his clasp-knife. It squeaked like an animal and snapped at his hand with its rotten teeth. Now the second and the third head. Christ! would he be able to mow the enormous field before the girl reached the other end? Springing madly about, he trampled them down and kicked them; his feet become entangled in their thin sucker-like claws, he fell, was seized, torn and suffocated. Then everything disappeared.

Everything disappeared in whirling confusion. And suddenly he heard quite near the veiled voice: "I have brought you the parcel. " He sprang up and opened his eyes, and before him stood the girl from Hybsmonka, squint-eyed and pregnant, her stomach damp, and gave him something wrapped up in a damp rag. "It's not her! " groaned Prokop painfully, and suddenly he saw before him the tall, dreary saleswoman who used to stretch his gloves for him on wooden sticks. "It's not her! " Prokop repeated, and there appeared before him a puffy child on legs bent with rickets who. who shamelessly offered herself to him! "Go away," cried Prokop, and then he saw an overturned can in the middle of a dried-up lawn and some cabbages covered all over with the traces of snails, and this picture would not disappear in spite of all his efforts to banish it.