Matthew's gray cat

Matthew's gray cat.

Matthew Bratsferd is an American infant who lives in a city in the state of New Hampshire. In January 2022, he turned seven years old.

On Christmas 2020, when Matthew was five years old and in the third grade of Kindergarten, his mother, violinist Myriam Straw, gave him a gray cat said to be seven months old.

Matthew feeds him with Kat croquettes with measure, checks that he does not lack water, he plays with him daily; for example, he throws sheets of school paper balled up, and the cat follows them, as if they were balls... The schoolboy, a student at an elite school in a residential area, "meows" –"meow, meow"–, and the pussycat replies: "meow, meow."

The strange thing is that the cat does not grow, and that Matthew's mom has only bought a single 10-pound (4.5359237 kilograms) bag of cat food since Christmas 2020, and consumption has apparently been low. Could it be that the felid goes out to hunt and eat mice or other small mammals, or has a neighbor been feeding him without Matthew or his mother noticing?

Almost always, his mother allows Matthew to take Kat with him in the car when they go grocery shopping at the mall or the neighborhood stores.

Well, one night, Kat came out the back of the house and jumped over the beautifully painted white wooden fence, Tom Sawyer style, for a night out. Myriam told her son not to worry, that the kitten would come back; and so it was, the next morning he was in front of the farm, meowing to be allowed to enter, or perhaps for food and water.

This cat story will continue...

A few more years will pass, and in October 2024 Matthew's father, professor Frank Bratsferd, will realize that the cat has been a sixth-generation electronic animal, Made in Japan. He has not eaten, nor drank water or milk, nor slept, nor defecated, but he is an almost natural feline.

He has been powered by a nickel-cadmium electric battery (atomic numbers, 28 and 48, respectively), or a lithium ion battery (atomic number, 3) of long duration that, when they have been depleted, it will be necessary to replace them. The kitty has two cavities for batteries and an extra switch to activate one or the other –apart from the on and off switch.

The infant Matthew will not be fooled. He has pretended and will pretend that the cat is real, and has accepted him as a pet, even more so because he has never cleaned the litter box. There's never been feline feces there.

Matthew has and will continue his interactions with the bright and loving kitty, occasionally interrupting his homework to play with his fabulous electronic Nippon cat, who has taught him a few cat and human tricks, and will teach him more in the future.