Different, more concrete take on the original. A little hard to follow for some reason. I thought he’d chopped his own hand off for a bit there in the middle.

Yeah. Probably should have put something about the hand belonging to the decesed in there.

No i think you should have made me wonder if it was his hand or the deseased even more cause that would be a morbid sense of humor {cutting off his own hand}. If you left it vague on purpose well then, that is awesome i loved it, if not i still loved it. I am going to experiment with your invention of using misplaced modifiers, to keep the reader guessing, and build suspense. good story.