I don't fucking care what your story is really about. I don't give a shit about your narrative arc, or your conflict, or your lovingly crafted character moments. Sure, I entered the Thunderdome to carve those things into my soul via flensing tools wielded by its sadistic denizens, but now I'm in the chair, Fuck All That. All I really want to do is warp and distort the minds of the young.

So the only thing your story has to have is the embodiment of a Thought Experiment, Paradox or similar mind-fucking construct. A real, previously-existing one, not some shit you thought up when you tried pot that one time at college and then forever after warned your church group about the dangers of Hard Drugs.

And when I say embodied, I mean it's part of the actual environment of the story, not just some fucker saying "You know, this reminds of a famous scientific conundrum blah blah I'm a complete tool". So Hiro J Protagonist is employed to work in the Chinese room, or is completely aggravated by being unable to outrun a tortoise, or something like this. The reader should be able to understand the nature of the paradox/Gedankenexperiment from the story without it being referred to directly.

DO NOT do a boring physics thing like The Monkey and the Hunter, where, SURPRISE!, shit falls at the same speed as other shit. You're not tied to those wikipedia lists, nor are all of them great examples.

And yes, it's ostensibly a children's story. But seeing as the purpose is to break young minds, I don't care if your virulent hatred of sprogs comes through in the slightest.