Cooking the Hook

The sign read “the MONKEY BITES”.  Ace sat with his back to the room tearing out single pages from a small bible and eating them, chewing slowly while looking up at the ceiling of his cage as if he was memorizing the passages. Billy, the owner and bartender, said he only ate one or two pages a day – it was not as if he was hungry. Billy always fed Ace every time he fed himself. In fact, he fed the monkey first since he was worried about being poisoned, a fair concern because he treated the cook like dirt.

I came across this yesterday.  It's a theme that has always run through my writing and personal philosophy. I suppose I'll have to learn the process of asking for permission to use quotes from other authors hoping it could be as simple as an email.