A woman named Jig and her unnamed boyfriend are waiting at a train station in Spain for their next train. In the distance, the hills in the valley are described as long and white.

The location of the train station—in the hot sun, with no shade and no trees—is in the middle of nowhere, in limbo between one place and another. This represents the limbo that Jig and her lover are facing. They are going nowhere in their relationship.

Jig compares the hills in the distance to white elephants. White elephants are, first, a symbol of Jig's pregnancy: white elephants are things nobody wants, and Jig's boyfriend does not want this baby. Hills are also a symbol of pregnancy because they rise up and form the shape of a pregnant belly.

An "elephant in the room" is the subject nobody wants to mention but which everyone is thinking about. Neither Jig nor her boyfriend want to directly confront the "elephant" of the possible abortion by naming it.

Jig then decides the hills don't look like white elephants after all, suggesting that she wants to keep her baby.

At the station, Jig and her boyfriend order beers; then Jig wants to try a new drink, which they do. She says,

That's all we do, isn't it—look at things and try new drinks?

This symbolizes the emptiness of the relationship. Rather than confronting their problems, they bury them in drink. By the end of the story, the couple's separation is emphasized when the boyfriend drinks by himself:

He drank an Anis at the bar and looked at the people.