The Bloodwood Table

All Characters 18 or older

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Kalli's grandfather built furniture. That was her memory. He was the one who cared for her, when her parents dumped her every weekend and sometimes longer. He was the one who fed her, and bathed her, and tucked her in at night. His hands caressed her as her rocked her to sleep, and made sure she wore clean panties. His hands gave her love, and built furniture. He was huge and strong and knew everything.

"Anyone can saw a board in two, Kalli," he had told her," but you have to love the wood, put your heart in it, to make it smooth and silky; just like you." He would rub the chest of drawers, or the table, or the bed he was building, with his strong hands and guide her small hands to feel the surface, and then have her touch her own skin. "When you can make wood feel like your skin, when you can make it alive, you can craft Art, not just bric-a-brac."

He taught her how to judge raw lumber and how to tension a band-saw blade. His house became not a dumping ground but a home; the smells of teak and walnut like home cooking to other people. She knew shop safety, types of glue, and how to change the bits on a drill press, before she was able to drive a car.

No one even asked her when he died if she wanted his tools; they were too valuable to have "sitting around for nothing." When they carted away the jig saw she shed the tears that had not come with his death, for it was the last machinery they had shared; she kept the teak cut-out of "Kalli" that she made with his hands on hers as her most prized possession.

After that she would walk through her parent's house and touch his ligneous art, and feel his texture. She could feel his hands touch her from the highboys, buffets and sideboards and she could feel his love. As she got older, she would touch herself and compare her skin to his handiwork, and wonder which was better. Could anyone inlay silver into walnut like he could?

She always wanted to be like him. In high school people scoffed at her, and only when she was old enough to live on her own could she go to the technical college and sign up for woodworking classes. She didn't need a teacher. She worked a boring, crappy job, and lived on dirt, so she could pay for the chance to use the tools she couldn't afford to buy. The shining blades reflected the green of her eyes, giving to them some of the chlorophyll that breathed for the weald as they stood in groves and jungles in their first lives.

Mr. Klaus was the instructor, and he was an adamant misogynist. He thought women should be barefoot and pregnant and that they should polish their beautiful furniture and worship it and their husbands. He had blatantly told her she was wasting his time and her money.

"To get a certificate from this class, you have to complete a project I approve," he towered over her 5' frame with his strong hands and shoulders. "I can tell you, little Missy, nothing you ever make will be good enough for me!" He detested people who desecrated the sacred planks, and saw Kalli as unqualified to become a priest(ess) of the order of wood.

She didn't care; she could make Art, and that was enough. She could bear the jibes as long as she could build furniture. Klaus fumed, but he saw her skills and couldn't decide whether to mould them or crush them. She agitated his serenity.

When Kalli took a long hard piece of Oak, and held its thickness in her little hands, she felt strange stirrings inside that she could not describe. It had a smell almost of sweat, a roughness like an unshaved chin, a knowledge within it. Running her fingers lightly over a board of Walnut, she felt its tight pores, like a woman' nose, and saw its darkness contrast with her pale skin, and it made her nipples hard; caressing her cheek with a dense shaft of Ebony, tracing the almost invisible veins with her lips left her panting and barely focused, and wanting more. She loved as a druid, communing with the souls of trees.

Bloodwood was her penultimate rush; hard as rock maple, dense as rosewood, but malleable as mahogany, it was toxic. Cutting or sanding it required gloves and masks, for opening its beauty required seduction. It fought back fiercely if you forced its timbers apart and invaded its core.

Sanguine curlings the same color as her hair piled around her hands as she ripped into it, and made the wood of Blood yield. She unconsciously lifted one crimson covered hand to adjust her pony tail, and left sawdust that merged with her tresses.

Klaus ridiculed her and told her classmates, "There's an idiot girl who wastes a glorious and rare piece of Bloodwood when Pine is the best she's good for! This is Art, not a hobby! It's sacrilege! " He wished she would leave and feared she might.

She was not an idiot, but she was obsessed. Spreading her naked legs in front of a mirror, she saw not her tight labia and thighs, but the perfect symmetry of a well made miter joint. Her breasts were things that were sometimes useful in holding a plank to work on, sometimes obstructions to her vision. Her fingers were micrometers to measure smoothness, and compare it to her cheeks. Her hair was a way to imagine carvings. And she thought of sex as a well fitting mortise and tenon, not as an animal act. Even semen looked to her like white wood glue.

Not that she had seen much semen; with no brothers and no lovers, she was lost in the woods, so to speak. The men around her noticed her beauty, but she sought and saw beauty only when ripped, sawn, mitered, rabbeted, and grooved.

So if bringing life to wood was the ultimate test, why not bring the wood to life? As she studied and pondered, she was struck by pictures of Caryatids, the carved female figures the Greeks used as pillars on some temples on the Acropolis. Why not do that in wood? She had a willing model in herself, and a camera, and time.

So she spent hours naked posing for herself, photographing herself from every angle; close ups of her genitals and face, long shots of her entirety. She formed the visions in her head. A bombé chest of herself. A table with four Kalli copies standing as table legs to support a solid blood wood top. She imagined callipygian curves and decided that mahogany was the right wood.

"If Goddard-Townsend could make eagle's talons the stood proud all the way to the tip in the 1700's, I can do it now." She said to herself. She knew it was technically difficult, with complex joinery, but she was ready for the task. First the table top. Two boards of blood wood, each fifteen inches wide and forty-eight long, run through the jointer and glued up as a single three-quarter inch thick mass of carmine. Then edging that was two inches wide, mitered at a 45 degree angle and attached so that the top appeared to be two inches thick.

She carefully carved each corner of the flat top so that if one looked closely from above the miters formed tiny little vulviform slits at the cusp of two thighs spread flat at ninety degrees, holding the center mass within their legs.

Then she set up the table saw to cut the concave curves of her waists. That required artistic touch, and trial and error. Once the right tilt was found, then the tawny lumber was fed across the blade at an angle, so the twirling steel scooped out the curves.

But to make them the same required the settings be unchanged. The class was only allowed access for two hours an evening; not enough time to do them all. Klaus would never approve any request she made, so she stole a key, and came in at midnight, to spend the dark hours before dawn re-inventing her own body in umber and blood.

She had to build cases to hide her work until she was ready. She used pine boards - cheap and also mocking of the instructor who was always on her mind. Mahogany was too dark to be her, so she used her knowledge of the art of wood bleaching, leaving only her nipples carved in the original dark color. Each of the four statues stood twenty-eight inches tall, standing erect and sensuous, with arms uplifted backwards at right angles to support the top. They were an art deco dream.

As she had planed the bloodwood she had carefully saved the shavings. These she shaped into curling masses of mock rufescent hair at each Caryatid's head and groin. She made tiny slits for her own labia, inlaid with blood red wood, inset from the surface, finished with shining polyurethane in contrast to the matte of her skin. On inspection each replica seemed to have moisture in her cleft.

Once she reached the finishing stages, she could shed the protective gear. In fact, she shed her shirt as well, for she could not run the air conditioner without a different key. She worked in nothing but cut-offs, dripping sweat onto her table, blending her own body fluids with her creation.

Without Kalli's knowledge, Klaus had noticed that someone had invaded his temple, and he was not adverse to violence to protect his gods. He made random inspections, and after a month saw the lights glimmering behind closed shades at one am. He eased up the stairs, stepping over the fourth step, the one that squeaked, and looked through the space of the partially open door.

That girl! She was there without permission, violating his rules, wasting his materials! Now he could expel her from his class! Now he would make his world normal. No longer would he be distracted by her face or the mounds of her breasts. No more would her bending and causing her jeans to tighten across her ass lead to his embarrassment of erection. Then he saw what she was doing.

A witch, an enchantress; only those words could describe someone so very female who was working such magic in such wooden material. His mouth gaped as he saw her touch the wood and then herself and then the wood. She was building copies of herself that were so alive he could see them breathe! And then in the dimmed lights he saw her nakedness, reddened with reflection of the crimson wood.

And then! Frowning, she kept rubbing the buttocks of one woman and then another. Finally she stepped back and removed her pants, and rubbed herself! Now he could see that she had fully faithfully reproduced her body four times over in every detail. He was harder then than the wood she worked, four times harder than ever before, no five times harder. He stumbled into the room as she stepped back and smiled in satisfaction at the completion of her masterpiece.

They collided, a shock for which neither of them was prepared. He tried to push himself away, but found only soft warm flesh beneath his hands, nothing at all like mahogany. He gasped as he touched her, and lightening flared from his palms. She was also electrified by the reception of his touch, as no man had ever really touched her since her grandfather died. And this was not the same. No, not at all.

They found themselves kissing, neither knew how, it just happened. Suddenly each had an overwhelming desire to touch and be touched by hands that appreciated smoothness and texture. They joined in ripping his clothes off, and then ran fingers and hands over each other, growing more excited with every second they explored.

In his mind, all he could feel was smoothness, more perfect than any wood he had ever touched. In her mind she felt the surfaces of oak, and walnut and ebony. Soon she was exploring with her lips as well, caressing every portion of his body. He followed suit, and they kissed each other's arms and shoulders and hands. They licked navels and knees as if in a mirror, and sucked upon corresponding necks and ears and cheeks. Then he found her nipples and the battle was unequal.

She had never felt this before, the fire in her loins, the heat in her lungs. She instinctively caressed her cheek with his dense shaft of maple, tracing the large veins with her lips and panting and barely focused, and wanting more. She pulled his log to her opening, and he pushed his end of the tree against her in return.

Seeking a place to meld, they lay upon the finished bloodwood table, and four copies of Kalli held her aloft as devout supplicants to entwine with her teacher, to learn from him things never taught in class. He encountered her hymeneal resistance, and pushed as if using a hand plane on a rough hewn board. She cried out, and added her own blood of innocence to her creation, and then her joyous juices and then the flood of her first orgasm.

A year later, the Klaus couple was known for the finest in hand made furniture anywhere. As they stood together at a showing, a nouveau riche Oil Man asked about the bloodwood table.

"That there is so durn beautiful," he said. "I'd pay any price for that. How much?"

"I'm sorry. That table is hand carved blooded wood. It is not for sale."