What do you think of this writing?

Three in the morning is the best time to break into an animal shelter. I’m not going near the animals, but they can sense when people are nearby, so I have to be careful.

The back door is locked, but there’s a window right next to it, covered with “found” posters and a sticker that tells me the place has a security system. Even though I’m wearing gloves, I take off my t-shirt and wrap my knuckles with it. The shelter can hardly afford to keep their animals fed, so I know they can’t afford a security system. A 50¢ sticker, though, they can totally afford. Doesn’t fool me. I punch without hesitation and the glass shards fall like raindrops. No alarm.

I shake the glass out of my shirt and pull it back over my head. With the “Found” posters still hanging, it doesn’t even look like the window is broken, so I rip the posters down. I wonder if I should piss on them, for good measure, but I can’t remember if piss has DNA in it or not. Better play it safe. I prop the door open with the rubber doorstop and pull the rusty wheelbarrow into the hallway.

I get a little lost on my way to the supply room. When I scoped the place a few days ago, pretending to be looking for a puppy for my girlfriend’s sixteenth birthday, it was from the front door, not the back. I end up taking a wrong turn and find myself in someone’s dingy, dark office.

Finally, I open the right door and there they are: stacks of cheap, generic-brand pet food and cat litter. There isn’t very much. Like I said, they’re practically bankrupt and can’t afford to keep the animals alive, so it doesn’t take me long to pile it all into the wheelbarrow. I should do it in two trips to get it all, but I haul as much out as I can in one trip, leaving a few bags behind. It made the storage room look even more pathetic, to have those few bags, so it was even better.

Once the pet food is loaded into the back of my uglyass pickup truck, I get the spray paint out of the front seat. I’m scared of waking up the animals, so I decide to make it a one-color job instead of a three-color, like I’d been planning.

The guy who ran the shelter, Ramon, is flamboyantly homosexual, so I spray the room with as many “Homo”s and “F*ggot”s as I can manage. I can’t decide if I should throw in a Jesus Fish or a Swastika. I’d been working on my Swastikas, so I make a big one on the ground, where the dog and cat food used to be.

When I’m finished, I’m sweating all over the place, even though it’s pretty chilly outside. I cover the food with a blue tarp and drive away.

I pull up to Gary’s house and put one load of the dog food over my shoulder. His place is a dump, with broken sh*t filling his front porch. It's home for this week at least. He’s a total crack-head and is awake almost all the time, so he’s not pissed when I knock on his front door.

His face lights up when he sees the dog food.

“Told ya I could hook you up,” I say. “I’ve got a couple more.”

It’s crazy, but Gary has the most adorable purebred toy poodle I’ve ever seen. The thing looks so feminine, but it’s actually a boy dog named Hobgoblin. Gary just calls him Hob. I don’t know where he got the dog, but I just know he can’t feed it and I don’t like animals going hungry.

Gary says I can stay as long as I want, because of the dog food, which is good news since I want to stay a while this time. I fall asleep on his couch, exhausted, to the sound of Hob eating the dog food from his dish in the kitchen.

In the morning, I turn on the TV before I’m even fully awake. The local station, WTFF (you can’t make this **** up), has the hot reporter at the no-kill animal shelter. I grin and turn it up, careful not to put it too loud in case Gary has somehow fallen asleep.

“…this senseless hate crime,” she says breathlessly into the microphone. “The Harrington Shelter would have been be forced to close its doors if not for the generous donations that have been pouring in all morning long.”

The camera cuts to the storage room. The swastika had been covered up by the most expensive brands of dog and cat food that could be found in the grocery store.

I sigh and put my hands behind my head, letting myself relax. It’s too easy. Every d*mn time I worry so much about whether or not it will work, but it’s always wasted worry. I need to learn.

People hate when bad sh*t happens to good establishments. If I make it happen, then good always follows. Without me, this animal shelter would have gone out of business. I just bought them time to get their act together, financially, and bought them advertising that they wouldn’t have gotten in any other way.

My name isn’t Robin Hood, but it d*mn as well should be. So I tell people my name is Rob. Because that’s what I do, and that’s who I am. I’m a legend, even if nobody knows it yet.