Christa Pike is awake in a Nashville hospital, and the waking does her no credit. Six days after Tennessee’s lethal injection failed on September 30, she opened her eyes, asked where she was, and learned that the sentence had not been carried out. Her lawyers report anger, cognitive fog, arms she cannot move, a throat that will not swallow, pneumonia, and a clot. She is conscious enough to know the state tried to kill her and failed. Consciousness, in her case, is not innocence restored. It is the return of a woman who, at eighteen, helped lure nineteen-year-old Colleen Slemmer to a Knoxville waste ground, beat her, cut her, and carved a pentagram into her chest. Slemmer has been quiet since 1995. Pike is not.

The belief now circulating is older than the hospital chart. When Pike sleeps, Colleen comes. Not as a therapist’s symbol and not as a legal exhibit, but as the girl who was not allowed to finish being nineteen. The visit is said to be exact. The waste ground, the cuts, the mark cut into flesh for a theater of darkness that was never theology and was always cruelty. Pike wakes confused because the confusion is earned. The drug burned her arms and the lines failed. The dream does not fail. A botched chamber can return a prisoner to a bed. It cannot return the victim to the world, and it cannot keep the victim out of the dark once the eyelids close.

Call it folklore if the modern mind requires a permit. The shape of it is moral, not clinical. A satanic crime is not a mood. It is a decision to treat another person’s body as an altar. The altar outlived the ceremony. Francis v. Resweber settled only the narrow point that an accident does not erase a sentence. It said nothing about nights. Pike can ask the nurses who they are. She cannot ask Slemmer to stay away, and the story being told in Nashville is that Slemmer does not stay away. Awake, Pike is a legal problem. Asleep, she is back at the only court that has not adjourned.

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