Leigh Pierce Estates is home to a diverse array of working mothers, immigrants, the forgotten elderly. All working poor—and all in danger. Because the tenants of Leigh Pierce are disappearing.Xavier, a young Black man living in an opiate-afflicted, gentrifying Atlanta neighborhood, is thrust into a surreal nightmare of starvation and consumption after a chance encounter leaves him infected with something horrifying.Succumbing to his infection, Xavier is drawn into the cobbled-together family squatting in Leigh Pierce’s A patriarch and matriarch from the Rust Belt whose health left with the Ford factories forty years ago, a first-gen American who learned that the institutions supposedly there to help were not a real option … People who, through a myriad of roads, fell into the same self-destructive cycle of indigency, harboring dark secrets and darker appetites.Now, Xavier is forced to confront the cost of survival in a world that has disregarded him, lost in a messy family dynamic of codependency and complicity all too like what he’s used to—a dynamic he’s desperate to break.