Dead Weight

DEAD WEIGHT
A Novel by Ellington "RIXX" Bass Sr.

Sometimes the heaviest thing you're carrying is the person holding you back.

Ty Foster came up out of nothing and built himself something real — his own place, his own peace, his own key on his own ring. Then he met Brandy, and handed it all over before she ever asked him to.

She never lied to him. That was the thing. She sold him the dream the realest way there is — by staying. By her daughter's juice in his fridge and her hand flat on his chest every night. And Ty, a man who came up on so little that a good day felt like a miracle he had no right to, gave up his own front door to build a home that would be hers the second she got angry.

What follows isn't one betrayal. It's a thousand small ones. The mountains he moves that she calls rocks. The doors that lock him out of a house he pays for. The nights he learns to go quiet, to disappear a little more, to lose slow instead of all at once — and the thing he does at his lowest, reaching for warmth, that he'll carry the rest of his life. Because Ty isn't a saint in this. He's a man being unmade at home, and a man doing wrong while it happens, and the book won't let him off either hook.

Set in the roughest corners of Richmond, Virginia and told in a voice that pulls no punches, DEAD WEIGHT is a raw, unflinching story of a good man loving a woman past the point of loving himself — of the slow, quiet way words can break a man down to nothing, and the harder, braver way he learns to put himself back together.

It's a story about a man abused in a way men are taught they can never speak on. About the difference between the weight that's yours to carry and the weight that's just killing your back for nothing. And about the day a stranger with months to live, choosing joy anyway, hands him back his own reasons to live his.

Ty spent three years learning to disappear.

DEAD WEIGHT is the story of him coming back.

For readers of raw, emotionally honest urban fiction — Sister Souljah, Ashley & JaQuavis, K'wan — who want a story that hits like the street and lands like literature.