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NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W
2021
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CAROL SCOTT-CONNER was born in Towanda, PA. She earned her BS in Electrical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1969, and her MD from New York University School of Medicine in 1976. She remained at NYU to complete a five-year general surgical residency in 1981. She is the author or coauthor of nine major surgical texts and a book of short stories. Her other works to date have included numerous papers, chapters and presentations on a wide range of surgical topics. She is currently at work on a third book of surgical stories, and happily revising two of her textbooks. Additionally, she is a graduate student in the creative writing program at Lenoir-Rhyne University in Asheville, NC. She lives in Iowa City with her husband and teaches surgery at the University of Iowa Carver College of Medicine.
TIM CHRISTENSEN, a molecular geneticist, is an Associate Professor of Biology at East Carolina University. He earned a BS from the University of Utah in 1996 and a PhD from Cornell University in 2002. He is currently pursuing an MFA at ECU. He has displayed his fine art photography multiple times at Joyner Library on ECU’s campus and is the winner of the 2019 Friends of Joyner Library Purchase Award. Additionally, he has given TED talks about his work in astrophotography and the role biology can play in art. These works are part of his 2014–2017 Space project. View more of his work on his website.
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Four large bright stars outline the body of the constellation Orion, the hunter. His right-hand shoulder, facing us, is the bright red star Betelgeuse. The stars that comprise Orion are not bound together in any way. They drift, each on its own journey through the universe, separated by vast distances that are compressed from our limited viewpoint into this transient pattern. The hunter will lose his shape as the eons speed by and the stars move relative to each other in cosmic time. You and I will have been married forty-six years come summer. Like a double star, we are bound to each other by our mutual gravitational pull. If we were indeed stars, we might look like a single point of light to some alien astronomer on a planet encircling Betelgeuse. It has been cloudy for days. As dusk darkens into evening, I search the sky, hoping to glimpse a star. When I see one, I make a wish. It is always the same wish. It is bad luck to tell the wish, but I will say this – I don’t ask anything for myself, I wish for something for us. And I wish it with all my heart. In January, I learn that Betelgeuse is dimming. This large star is normally one of the brightest stars in the night sky of winter at our latitude. Now it