An apple a day keeps the doctor away but it brings all the horses to the yard.

Welcome to Night Vale.

Listeners: Meagan Wallaby is missing. She was last seen on Saturday night, attending a party in the desert near Drainage Ditch Road. All Night Vale residents are urged to be on the lookout. Megan is a medium-sized man's hand covered in thick dark hairs. She wears a wristwatch and a pinky ring inscribed with Cyrillic, and is surgically attached to the body of a 6'10 bald Russian man. She was last seen wearing a blue halter top and jeans. If anyone has information on Megan's whereabouts, please contact her parents immediately. We will be following this story with updates as search parties continue to comb the desert. In the meantime, here's what we know so far:

Saturday evening was hot in the Scrublands, and the sky bristled with thunderclouds. Megan was excited to celebrate outdoors with her friends that night. She had just received her associate's degree in Sports Medicine and was looking forward to starting a new job at the Senior Center Water Aerobics League on Monday. Her close friend Tamika Flynn had organized a small gathering in honor of Megan's success.

At first, Tamika had planned a reading party, where everyone would sit in a circle and silently read their favorite books, but Megan convinced her that they should hire a DJ.

Michelle Nguyen from Dark Owl Records was deep into spinning her second set when she noticed Megan lumbering away from the dance area, toward a grove of prickly pear.

MICHELLE: I thought she was taking a phone call. At least, I know someone's phone rang around that time. I remember because I was trying to figure out what song it was. The ringtone, I mean. It was highly rhythmic and reminded me of insects buzzing? Like [imitates a phone on vibrate mode]. I used to have a band, and it sounded a lot like one of our songs. It's hard to think about how one song goes when another song is playing though. Actually three songs were playing at the time. Tamika asked me to play popular music and the only way I'll do that is if I can spin multiple songs at the same time so it sounds a little like a nightmare. I call it freak-pop.

CECIL: Tamika Flynn also recalled seeing Megan leave the dance floor:

TAMIKA: It was around midnight. I was reading near the bonfire when Megan walked past me. I remember thinking that she was walking kind of fast. I asked her where she was going but she didn't answer me. I didn't think anything was wrong. I figured she just didn't hear me. So I went back to my book. I'd brought a whole collection of books with great party scenes in them, in case anyone else wanted to read. Great Gatsby, Finnegan's Wake, Master and Margarita... It was only me reading though.

Shortly after midnight, it began to rain. It rained hard. Everyone took cover in an abandoned mining shack, where they realized that Megan was not among them. They went out looking for her, but she was nowhere to be found.

CECIL: If you would like to join the search effort, please contact Councilmember Tamika Flynn. More on this story later.

First, a message from the Water Bureau.

There's something in the water. It is odorless, colorless, tasteless, invisible. We don't know anything else about it, but we do know that there's something in the water that was not there before. We have no guidelines to share at this time. We'll just keep drinking it and see what happens. In the meantime, please report any unusual symptoms to our customer service department. For example, a sudden loss of taste or painful mouth sores. The sudden loss of a job or a painful breakup. Vivid dreams or juicy gossip. Anything at all. We want details. Call us.

Now, the crime report.

Violent crime in the tarantula community is at a record low. Many attribute this to the Teach A Spider to Read program, which has improved literacy rates in that community from 2% to 99.7%. The median tarantula now reads at a postgraduate level thanks to the efforts of Animal Control. However, nonviolent crime among tarantulas is up. Like, way way up. Fraud, identity theft, cyberhacking, corporate espionage, and forgery are rampant right now. Citizens are encouraged to change their passwords and check their bank accounts. Do not give out any personal information over the phone. Trust no one.

I have an update on the disappearance of Megan Wallaby. Megan's watch has been found in the bottom of the drainage ditch along Drainage Ditch Road. The watch stopped working at 12:05, around the time Megan was last seen. As we all know, there are many reasons why a watch might be separated from its owner, and there are many reasons why a watch would stop working. For example, the clasp was loose and the battery died. Or gravity got weird and time stopped. Or some kind of butterfly effect situation, where a butterfly flapped its wings against Megan's wrist, causing her to swat at it, breaking the watch. It's not necessarily an indicator that something utterly horrible has happened to Megan. Not at all. The watch was found nearly five miles from the location of the party, where Drainage Ditch Road ends and becomes an inhospitable wasteland.

Megan's parents have released a statement, which I will now read.

“First, we would like to thank the efforts currently underway to help bring our Megan home. This last week has been like a nightmare but we have been given strength by the support of our community. We also want to thank our neighbors who have been dropping off baked goods and casseroles. We actually have a lot of dietary restrictions and can't eat most of this stuff, but we really do appreciate the thought. If anyone out there eats meat, dairy, gluten or sugar, please come over and take some of this food. We are storing a lot of it in our fridge and no longer have room for our own groceries. Thank you again, we are very grateful. The Wallabys.”

Speaking of baked goods, it's time for birthday shoutouts! People eat cake for their birthday, so that transition totally works.

A very happy birthday to Kim Cohn, who works down at the Fuel n' Go. She is seventeen today and is planning to celebrate by having a nice dinner with her family over at the Red Lobster, where coincidentally it is shift manager Perry Laredo's birthday, who is turning 56 but will have forgotten that today is his birthday until he discovers a sheet cake from his employees in the break room, which will have been made by Maryam Ahmadi, who was just promoted to the bakery department down at the Ralph's and is anxious to prove herself as her toddler is turning two years old today and she is trying to save up for the Spanish language immersion preschool run by Valerie Marquez who does not celebrate birthdays but does make wishes whenever she blows out a candle. She knows it's silly but sometimes it works. At least it helps her understand what she really wants, which is the first step to getting what she wants. At least that's what she read in a self help book. And happy birthday to Teddy Williams, who is turning 42.

And now, a disturbing update in the Megan Wallaby story. Megan's non-sentient hand has fallen from the sky. A group of Boy Scouts, who were conducting heavy artillery maneuvers in the Scrublands, recovered the severed appendage after witnessing its graceful, arcing descent onto their mock battlefield. The hand was positively identified by Megan's parents as belonging to her body donor. As we all know, there are many reasons why a hand might become detached from its body and fall from the sky. It's not necessarily an indicator that something unspeakably awful has happened to Megan. But it's safe to say that probably something pretty bad has happened.

There's been speculation that Megan's body donor, once thought to be a benevolent gift from Night Vale's sister city of Nulogorsk, could have had ties to Russian organized crime, who are known to remove the hands of their betrayers. I mean, this theory is mainly mine, based on the fact that Carlos and I were up late watching the Cronenberg film Eastern Promises on TV last night. Some have also theorized that Megan has been kidnapped and the hand contains some kind of invisible ransom note. Others feel that Megan herself, perhaps lost in the sky somewhere, has dropped the hand as a clue to her whereabouts. Still others have whispered: “the sand monsters done ate that girl”. Not sure what they're referring to there or how they got inside my shower wall.

The important thing is that we stay optimistic and keep searching for Megan, who is still missing and presumed alive. Let's clear our minds with this week's word jumble.

The following nonsense words will produce a well-known phrase when rearranged. Here we go:

“Dear Eva. My name is Caplan Norwalk Jr and I was born on Old Peachtree Road in Lawrenceville, Georgia on October 22nd, 1974. I am your father. I heard that you play the guitar and so I made you a book of songs that you can put music to. It's the first thing I've written besides this letter so they might not be very good. If you do make any songs, maybe you could send some to me. I would really like to hear them. May the gods and angels guide and protect you. Love, Dad. Inmate 21959.”

All right, there it is. Rearrange that gibberish into something with meaning. The hint is: cartoon rooster's friend's house. Submit your answers by Friday for a chance to win. The answers do not have to be correct. Winners are randomly selected from all submitted answers, as are the losers. You don’t want to know what they do to the losers, so good luck! This has been this week's word jumble.

Listeners. I have terrible news and good news. I'll start with the terrible news. Megan's lifeless body was found in the Scrublands, torn apart by vultures. The good news is: Megan Wallaby is back, and she is alive and well! Maybe I should have started with the good news. Anyway, having lost her body to a grisly fate, details pending, Megan has retained the appearance of a man's body-less right hand once again. However, she is now deeply tanned, her nails have a healthy luster, and her fingers have developed notable muscle tone. Megan crawled from the desert only moments ago, emerging into the parking lot of the Desert Flower Bowling Alley and Arcade Fun Complex, and is now resting at home. She has not released a statement yet, though has hinted that her story is a harrowing adventure filled with tragedy, horror, and romance. She is composing her statement now and will send it to me soon. While we wait, let's check in with the weather.

[Weather: “Asenweg 16“ by Laura Theis, https://badasssnowwhite.bandcamp.com/]

Megan Wallaby has sent me a statement, in her own words, about what happened to her and where she has been.

MEGAN: It all started at the desert party. It was around midnight when I left the dance floor so I could find a place to pee in the desert. I don't know if you have ever been in a body with that anatomy but the ability to pee outside easily is a major perk. I went past a cactus grove and decided to stand over the side of the drainage ditch. It's actually an arroyo, which is a type of steep gully created by intermittent flooding. I learned that in my advanced anatomy class, because there are several arroyos in the human body. While I was out there, I felt a horrible pain in my left side and knew I was having a massive heart attack. I had learned about the signs and symptoms of a heart attack in my intro to geology class.

I lost control of my body and fell down into the arroyo, breaking several bones. My body was already dead at that point, so it didn't really hurt. But I was stuck. I started drumming my fingers in the dirt, hoping my friends would hear, but Michelle's DJing was too loud.

Pretty soon after that, the thunderstorm happened. Within minutes, a flash flood washed through the arroyo and pushed my body miles away. I found myself stranded in the middle of nowhere, anchored to my body, just waiting and hoping for rescue.

The next day, I woke to loud screeching sounds. The nearby cliffs were full of nests. I watched as large pieces of me were pecked away and carried through the sky by vultures and kestrels. It was raptor baby season and there were many shrieking mouths to feed. I managed to bury myself mostly in the sand to avoid getting pecked to death and waited until a vulture finally severed my wrist. That was painful. I was bleeding a lot then, but I scampered up the side of the arroyo as fast as I could.

My movement attracted attention and I was soon being chased by a large buzzard. I saw a hole in the ground, just big enough to fit inside of, and hid. That was where I met a kind tarantula named Nero. I had taken cover in one of the entrances to his family's burrow. Nero led me through a network of tunnels, deep underground. I stayed with his family for several days and they gave me excellent medical care. Their society is very communal and everyone I met made me feel super welcome, although there was a language barrier. Tarantulas communicate through vibration patterns, made by drumming their legs against the earth. Nero began teaching me their language, Tarantulish, which is really beautiful. Over that time, Nero and I grew closer. We ended up falling in love. Yesterday, we got engaged.

Some people might say we are rushing things, but when you know, you know. I am still grieving the loss of my body, but I will not be seeking a replacement body donor at this time. I'm planning to move into Nero's family burrow after the wedding, which can only accommodate me at my current size. Eventually, we're going to build our own funnel web in the branches of a mesquite tree. We have already picked out the location, which is near town and has great mesa views. There will be an engagement dinner this weekend at Big Rico's Pizza so our families can meet each other, which everyone is looking forward to.

I plan to start my job with the Senior Center Water Aerobics League next week and can't wait to meet everyone there. Go Anemones! I want to thank everyone who searched for me, comforted my parents, and never gave up hope. I am very happy to be back with everyone I love and am excited to begin this new chapter of my life.

CECIL: And I can speak for everyone, Megan, when I say we're happy to have you home safe.

Stay tuned for a repeat of the news and weather, in Tarantulish.

Goodnight, Night Vale. Goodnight.