He flew, yes really. He jumped from the unfinished parapets and flew, his hammer a weight he’d cut free of, shooting off like a helium balloon some kid let go, and then, like an arrow, scutting out of line, the construction site a clearing in the forest. For a moment, he wheeled in space, like an idea, dove head-first to the aspens, leaf edges sharpening his sight, and it was like angels, it was like a party, the raindrops a parachute or a cape, his hands grazing the leaves, the leaves tickling his palms, lift, lift, with the changing weather. On the veined cuticles he could smell diesel floating over from the skidsteer, dust the raindrops kindled as they hit, and the cooling heated temperature of a damn good pour coming on.

His brother says take the stairs, so he does. His dead brother, but that doesn’t faze him. In the dark, he opens the steel door, turns onto the landing, and every time, its floor slithers away and he flops into the lull, speeding to the south side of the building so he can boom a cart of scaffolds. A green and yellow can of corn bounces up out of a trench and strikes him in the face. His driver’s seat is a chair in the trailer and he’s eating from that cold can three times a day. Then he’s counting cabinets through four hundred rooms and the numbers blur on his sheet at the prod of a pencil, he has to count them again, what was he counting? Hinges? Glides? Knobs? He’s under a sheet of poly in one of the rooms, a painter’s brush and the paint walloping the plastic over his chest. Then he stirs in the elevator shaft, plummeting. He stirs, face under plastic, his body rigid from the free-fall.

With his earbuds jacked in he listens to the iPod. To keep from getting caught in the closet asleep he suspends a pair of pliers that will jar him when they fall. If he wears earplugs instead, he hears a great volume of space caving at either direction, parentheses or corridors pointing to the scent of vanilla, to the cleaning girl who vacuums furnished suites. When he found her sweater yesterday in the north-wing he brought it to his nose and inhaled. He last felt like that when he unplugged a water pump in the rain, the hum of it through his limbs. Clogged with perfume, he felt his neck and groin prickle, as they are doing now. He kisses her little wrists in the darkness, wrists he’d like to bite and taste marmalade. In her floral uniform, then her sweater, then undressed, she eases him to the ground, now a bed. Pears are tumbling out of her shirt, which becomes a gown, high-ridden. Together they swim, they sweat, along the corridor to the basement. She rocks violently over him, thighs like oiled fur, the curled ends of her hair brushing his chest. Sometimes she has charred stumps extending from her shoulders or she glistens not with sweat but an arid nakedness. Then he sees she is not human at all, but first a river otter, carrying the river and fetid with fish, and then a silver bear with sick sad eyes. Now she is human, and from the taut line of her body, smoother than concrete, he meets the unguarded tremors of her face. As he comes clumsily, she tells him, It’s okay. She says, Sleep.

“Dreamtime” appears in PRISM 52:1.

Garth Martens won The Bronwen Wallace Award in 2011. His work is published or forthcoming in Poetry Ireland Review, Vallum, The Fiddlehead, Grain, and The Malahat Review. For the past eight years he has worked in large-scale commercial construction. His first book will appear with House of Anansi in 2014. He lives in Victoria, British Columbia.