Episode
E28 - Enter Hills (Dalia Taha, read by Graeme Thomson)
- Podcast
- MEMORY FOR DENIAL
- Published
- Jan 7, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 200
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Summary
You can’t see it but I stared too long at the hills my eyes have bruised. It’s on the inside, beneath the skin, in the spot closest to what they call the soul. The hills are otherworldly and distant, particularly those between Jericho and Amman— from the taxi, they appear as a procession of souls, or like snipers contemplating the desert road. Everything is in its place, like a mathematical equation: the living on one side, and the dead on the other. But from somewhere on those hills, I imagine the dead waving to us, trying to climb down to the highway, where the cars glimmer before they vanish into the wind. In the right lane, one truck after another hauls stones under a setting sun, where the wind is the one true driver, dragging us behind it, our necks bent backward. I can understand now that everything began here, on this arid, lightless land. Everything that came next was coincidence: trees, rivers, insects, the shapes of clouds and weeds, and suspended bridges. And it is here too that everything will end, leaving no trace of this world but the mystery of how it began. I’m obsessed with the hills. I can’t stop staring at them— like I’m trying to remember where we met before, like their name is on the tip of my tongue. I try to pull it out from a cavernous gorge within me. From my childhood, I’ve believed that if I stared at anything long enough, it would start to move. This, of course, has never happened. But the hills do in fact look like they’re about to start walking towards me. Just look at the droplets of light shimmering above them: like a hundred eyes opening at the same instant. My bags are in the trunk, and here, in the hot air of the Jordan Valley, I feel as though what my hands folded just moments ago were not my clothes but crumpled souls, and that wha…