Merriam-Webster says retreat is: a place of privacy or safety, refuge; a period of group withdrawal for prayer, meditation. Merriam-Webster says retreat is: an act or process of withdrawing, especially from what is difficult, dangerous, or disagreeable; the process of receding from a position or state attained, ‘the retreat of a glacier’. The new year ekes along like a slow-moving snowdrift, a glacial pace, settling high on her shoulders—and then it is February the seventeenth, and retreat is here.

On the first day, God created the heavens and the earth. One was good, and one was worse, so he kept them apart from each other, one lording over the other; and he created light, and saw it was good, and separated it from all the bad and ugly underneath.

“Were you skipping worship today already?”

The cabins their church rents for winter retreat are flimsy wisps, metal poles that fold like cardboard. Constance thinks if Tiffany leans over the side of the top bunk any more, the entire thing might collapse and crush her flat.

The thought spares her from having to answer, from having to remember—that two hours ago she had crept out the back door of the cabin during hymns, snagged someone else’s chocolate off their bed, and torn the wrapper with her teeth to spare herself from having to uncover her frozen fingers. For an hour she had skittered aimlessly back and forth across the field around their isolated cabin, stamping slow into slush, marring the pristine landscape as she watched night fall. Somewhere in that little orange-streaked area between daylight and sunset, she had gnawed on stolen caramel until her gums felt shiny and raw. It had been good, and the Lord saw that it was good—it was a pain that meant penance, that ended with clean.

“Of course I was skipping. I mean...what did you expect?”

“We do this every year,” Elizabeth says helpfully from her right. She’s also lying on the bottom bunk. “I mean, I didn’t skip today, granted, but...”

“Exactly! If you’re going to skip every time, at least be consistent and go together.” Tiffany’s eyes are tiny pinpricks of light, glowing stars affixed to a flaking ceiling. “You should give it a try this time, you know. They invited a really good speaker this year. Liz will back me up, won’t you?”

 “I mean, he’s okay.” Elizabeth shifts awkwardly, zips herself back up in her sleeping bag. Above her, some distant acquaintance snores in a way that sounds like a derisive snort. “She’s not wrong, you know. Maybe we should give it a try. He might make you think or something.”

Just like the one they invited the year before that, and the year before that.  Constance lies back in bed without saying anything, stares blankly at the metal rods above her. They remind her of prison bars, a cage that separates her from Tiffany and all the believers and angels and God above her.

Every year, they make little personalized envelopes for everyone and hang them on the walls on the main cabin. It’s kitschy, it’s cheap; she has seen her fellow churchgoers writing letters to each other in glitter pens on Japanese post-it notes when they should supposedly be taking notes on sermons. More specifically, she has seen Elizabeth glaring at them as they seal their letters with puffy stickers, fold them into flowers over their bibles. Elizabeth says they are fake believers. Elizabeth says they are lying, that their faith is cheap, that their prayers are worthless. She says that she is above the mindless herd, in the way she glances toward the cabin longingly when she skips sermons with Constance and the way she refuses to take communion even though she is baptized, with her nose up and her hand out. She thinks she sees something everyone else doesn’t, thinks everyone else is still wavering on the edge, and she can at least respect Constance for making up her mind and jumping over it.

So they pass their own notes back and forth, dangling limply in those garish envelopes, little jabs and spiteful words about all the people and places and things they hate. Constance likes it; she likes being bitter, she likes being angry, she likes being purposeful. She likes knowing where she stands, having her mind made up. Elizabeth does too, she can tell; they walk tenuous, parallel tightropes that they rely on each other to get across. If Elizabeth can drive home how much she hates all these fake believers, then they really are fake, and she really is better. If Constance can drive home how much she hates this fake religion, it really is fake, and she really doesn’t doubt herself.

Every year, the first envelope—and, inexplicably, the most brightly-adorned one—is one addressed to ‘God,’ a positively tooth-rotting idea dreamed up by their youth pastor as a way of speaking to the holy one privately during the retreat. Their pastor has sworn to burn those letters after their three days are over, has promised the collective that no one will ever read them—but today,  after Constance feeds that envelope her same annual confession of doubts, she bites her lip and looks around and, somehow unnoticed, reaches her hand into that forbidden envelope and yanks out a handful of paper. Neat creases, jagged tares, full pages; she holds the church in her hands, twenty-odd voices sticking to her fingers, and she jams them ruthlessly into her pocket and races to the bathroom with that damned envelope on her back as she runs. She reads them in a handicapped stall, the body of the church, the body of Christ, takes her first communion in that damp little closet and flushes them down the toilet immediately afterwards. Her pastor asks for strength, Tiffany tells God she doesn’t trust him, and Elizabeth thanks him in an unsigned letter that Constance wouldn’t have recognized if not for the swooping downward loops on her y’s. They are the same upward curves she uses in her h’s when she writes ‘hate’ and ‘horrible’, only flipped and rotated and nearly unrecognizable on the first take.

On the second day, God split the water with a dome; he separated like from like, and one was the sky and one was just the same water that it had always been, that it would always be. One was above, one was below; and even if they had started the same, or seemed the same, or really were the same, one was still above and the other would always be far from heaven.

On the third day, Constance finds Tiffany and Elizabeth during the ten minutes allotted to morning devotion.

“Let’s go out and do them by the lake,” she says, hands in her pockets, devotion booklet nowhere to be found. The two stand without another word and pull on their jackets as Constance taps her foot by the door, letting sweat seep into her fleece-lined boots.

On the third day, God gathered the waters to create seas, oceans, presumably lakes. Dry land was what was left over from that gathering; it was an absence, a lack, the parts of the world that were shriveled up and dried, a remainder after God stripped them bare. He came back and planted and grew, sure, but that was how it had started; the land was empty. They lived, breathed, and died on empty.

The lake is sold ice at this time of year, the land covered in crystalline coats of frozen water; they are impossible to differentiate, and Constance is two feet out on the lake before she realizes the ground under her is really hollow, ice feet deep. Life is frozen beneath her, fish and algae and filthy muck suspended in blue amber. For a few moments, she is above it all—and then she turns around, and trudges back up, and she is standing back on empty.

Tiffany is doing her devotions, but her eyes keep straying from her booklet. Constance can tell from the way she is perpetually squinting, as if the word of God is too holy and pure and bright for her eyes to bear; which is ridiculous, stupid, it means that she is glancing out on the glassy surface of the water, the sun plastered in the sky like a lopsided thumbprint, the world draped in glittering, ostentatious crystals of snow. Her pen taps, leaving spidery trails of ink along the edge of the paper. They look like footprints in untouched snow.

“I have an idea,” says Elizabeth, folding her booklet into quarters and stuffing it in her pocket. Constance’s entire body feels numb and cold even as Tiffany sets her own book aside and smiles inquisitively; she feels cold in her limbs like static as the two whisper, then laugh, then turn to her. Their happiness comes from a superior place, some higher power; she cannot help but feel as if she doesn’t belong, as if it would be impossible to partake.

But Tiffany’s laughter digs icy tendrils into her lukewarm heart and before she knows it she is lying with them on the ground, alongside Elizabeth’s warm smile in the pure powdered snow; Tiffany is shrieking with laughter, flapping her limbs back and forth, and the snow that parts under her arms and legs seem more to exude from her than to make way. Elizabeth follows suit, spreading her wings against the ground with her own subdued smile, eyes trained on the bleak blue sky. Constance stares for a second, then follows suit; slowly first, then faster and faster, a snow angel taking flight, soaring lower and lower into the sinking slush. The act is sacred, holy, sanctified; it is the same feeling, the same tingling pain as snow slips under her collar and into her sleeve, the same clean. She listens to her friends laugh and the sound melts inside her, collects like shining dust in her hair and bites at the ends of her fingers and gets into her mouth.

On the third day, Constance and her friends part the water, melt it away from their bodies and leave themselves empty and new on dry land.

On the fourth day, Constance attempts to drive through a winter storm for the first time; as night falls, she packs her bags and says her goodbyes and goes back to a world where the only day she has to think about God and sin and heaven is on the seventh day, when she can breathe easy and relax. It’s a practical blizzard when her dad finally drives up to the cabin, the elements protesting wildly as she attempts to escape. They are almost out of the forest when it happens—the road slips, then disappears, and suddenly she is five feet in a ditch and the entire world is behind her, blaring and honking and flashing their headlights in angry unison. Elizabeth calls the church a hive mind. Tiffany calls it one sanctified body.

Her father takes the driver’s seat with a sigh as she ventures out into the snow, watching helplessly for a few moments before something compels her to throw her flimsy, negligible weight against the push-and-pull motion of her father’s driving. Call it helping, call it getting in the way—she can feel the jagged edges of the license plate as it sinks its teeth into her jeans, the embrace of the grit and frost that gather beneath her as the vehicle whines and fidgets. The car inches forward and backward, heaving itself like the tide in crests and reluctant ebbs; the acrid stench of petroleum fills her nose as the engine bellows like a bull, the glass of the back windshield breaking contact with her skin before the car hits the edge of the road and crashes back with cold ferocity. Her father yells something out the window as the taillights flash, bathing the trees and snow in waves of scarlet and gold, and once again she rises up to meet the car.

Constance thinks to herself for not the first time that weekend, as her fingers slide against the feathery layer of frost on the trunk and the shrieking of tires around her fade into the shrieking of wind, that she is wrestling against the unmovable hand of God.