"...black timbers etched against a setting sun..."

From The Disinherited, by Jack Conroy:

A mine tipple is like a gallows, especially if you chance to see its black timbers etched against a setting sun; and the cage dangles from the cathead like a hangman's rope. I have thought whimsically when a miner's head has appeared out of the shaft, apparently supported by the cable only, that his tongue should protrude and his legs kick spasmodically.

Grim foreshadowing indeed, but I also admire how Conroy leavened the imagery somewhat with the narrator's adolescent "whimsy" - though that whimsy, like most of the novel so far, is in itself strikingly morbid.