Before time began, Old Star and Old Mother had been young and passionate newlyweds. The one day there had been a terrible argument. Old Mother (who in those long-ago days had been known by her real name, which was Lydia) had caught Old Star (whose real name was Apon) hanging about a beautiful young woman named Cassiopeia. They'd had a real bang-up fight, those two, a hair-pulling, eye-gouging, crockery-throwing fight. One of those thrown bits of crockery had become the earth, a smaller shard the moon, a coal from their kitchen stove had become the sun. In the end, the gods had stepped in so Apon and Lydia might not, in their anger, destroy the universe before it was fairly begun. Cassiopeia, the saucy jade who caused the trouble in the first place had been banished to a rocking-chair made of stars forever and ever. Yet not even this had solved the problem. Lydia had been willing to try again, but Apon was stiff-necked and full of pride. So they had parted, and now they look at each other in mingled hatred and longing from across the star-strewn wreckage of thir divorce. Apon and Lydia are now three billion years gone, they have become Old Star and Old Mother, the north and the south, each pining for the other but both now too proud to beg for reconciliation...and Cassiopeia sits off to the side in her chair, rocking and laughing at them both.
I think the reason I like this story so much is because of the detail with which it is told. Ol' Mista King, he be one heck of a story tella. A curious note though. Though in this book the sky is as alien as its world, we (meaning real life people) do have one familiar constellation in our sky; that of Cassiopeia. There are several stories of her, but in all of them she is a proud, vain, and beautiful woman (aren't they all?) and at the end of all of them she is turned to stone (by Perseus with Medusa's head) and then the other offended gods (usually Neptune) place her among the stars in a rocking chair so that for half of each night she must hang upside down. I've noticed ol' Cassie is mentioned in most of Stephen King's books (or at least quite a few of them). There's a scene in The Green Mile where John Koffee points to the stars and exclaims with the innocence of a child ''Look, it's Cassie! The lady in the rockin' chair.
