An object at rest remains at rest

Once upon a time, there was a princess who had a tremendous and mysterious power. This power was mysterious in the fact that it could either benefit her kingdom with a magnitude too great to be measured, or it could make all of her hair fall out, which of course would be horribly embarrassing because only old men had no hair. The uncertainty of the whole thing lied in which would happen when she used this power: infinite improvement of hundreds of lives, or horrifying embarrassment. The people of the kingdom knew nothing of her power, and lived on each day in poverty, farming the land past the point of exhaustion, sewing until it was too dark to see, hoping that someday they could have a moment of rest. The beggars wandered through the streets asking for anything--food, money, clothing, but there was nothing to give. The sick became pale skeletons; they coughed until their throats bled.

The princess knew about the poor state of the kingdom. She knew about it firsthand, because she had ridden in carriages through the town during royal parades. She had seen the beggars with their glazed eyes and tattered jackets, she had heard the cries of the diseased. She had seen the tops of the heads of seamstresses who didn't have the time (or the will?) to look up from their work. Her father had told her to ignore them; it wasn't her place to mingle with such detestable people, and didn't she know that he had done all he could to help them? She answered yes, she did know, but anyone could tell by looking at his robes that he was lying.

The princess longed to help her kingdom, and every morning when she woke up she thought, "Today I'll do it. I'll use my power to save them", but every time she put her fingers together to snap them a wave of fear rolled through her. What if it didn't work? What a fool she would make of herself, a magical princess with the power of baldness, the power of an old man. So with a sigh she would put her hand down and run it through her long, uncut hair.

She did this every morning, every year as the kingdom crumbled, until the day she died, because she was a cowardly selfish dumbfuck.

The end.