“The truck driver was shooting from the window of the cab as he smashed through the throngs of people — many still in beachwear — at 40mph,” reported a Mirror article. In that instant the throngs were still “people,” many still in beachwear. They were not yet “bodies.” They were not yet a street of bodies and beachwear. They were still people with possessions. Whereas, two sentences later, the article reports, “Bodies were left strewn across the street after a terrorist ploughed into revellers along the Promenade des Anglais in Nice.”

“Daylight reveals horror of Nice attack as buggies, bodies, and belongings litter promenade,” proclaimed the Sun’s headline. Bodies were, in that list, of a part with buggies and belongings. The buggies were once the belongings of these bodies — a single unit of association (“a woman pushing a buggy”) — but now they were separate, itemized objects. Things.

In recounting her experience to Channel Nine, Tori Anderson, an Australian visiting Nice, said:

And I turned around and behind me was this big truck. My friend and I just looked to the side, and the bodies directly beside us got pulled under the truck. Bodies were flying left, right, and centre… The only thing we could really do was jump off the promenade and land on the rocks down below. There was a couple of hundred people pushing everyone off the edge of the promenade. Everyone was landing on rocks. There were people — their bodies were tangled everywhere. We landed on rocks and ran for our lives.

I found some of the most excruciating parts of Anderson’s account to be the person/body substitutions and slippages. “My friend and I just looked to the side, and the bodies directly beside us got pulled under the truck.” In Anderson’s recollection she referred to “bodies” rather than “people” standing beside her prior to their being pulled under the truck. I realized in her statement to the reporter she was not consciously choosing one word over another. But the word “bodies” in that context conjured the possibility that, in that moment, Anderson already saw these individuals as bodies. It conjured the mental image of Anderson looking into the faces of those standing beside her and seeing bodies, already-bodies, in the split second before they were taken by the truck. Even if she did not see them in any traditional sense — their faces, their final expressions — did she sense their presence around her as already-bodies rather than people? But the truly most horrific and disorienting passage in Anderson’s account was: “There were people — their bodies were tangled everywhere,” as if she was unsure what state they were in, perhaps between states, still people but with their bodies “tangled everywhere.”