If all you're trying to do is bring in a stored hash, why not do it the easy way:

use strict;
use warnings;
use Storable;
use Data::Dumper;

my $h_ref = { 'This' => 1, 'That' => 2 };

store $h_ref, 'myfile';

my $stored_hash = retrieve('myfile');

print Dumper $stored_hash;
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