Make a fall basket for your next-door neighbors, whom you haven’t talked to offline in seven months.
Draw faces on them and have them sit next to you on the couch for movie night.
Juggle them in a viral TikTok video (quick, while you still can).
Eat one a day to keep the doctor away, since they still charge a thirty-dollar co-pay to downplay your foot pain via teleconference.
Carve apple roses in honor of the flowers you’d be able to go outside and see if the A.Q.I. weren’t three hundred.
Put them into a pot of water and try bobbing for them. This is the closest you’ll get to swimming all year.
Let them ferment in your bathtub until they form a foul but potent cognac, and drink it while watching the confirmation hearings for our new Supreme Court Justice.
Peel off the skin in long strips, let the strips dry, and twist them into pompoms. Cheer yourself on as you endure your seventeenth Zoom date.
Buy a press and start your own craft cidery to supplement your income now that you’re earning sixty per cent of your salary while doing a hundred and twenty per cent more while working from home.
Dump a few in the Little Free Library around the block in exchange for a guidebook to Canada.
When you’re up at night worrying about dictatorships, try stacking the apples into a precarious pyramid, then watch helplessly as it crumbles into ruins.
Throw them all away and have an appletini instead. It’s been a rough year.
